Joel Kotkin explains it all to you.

The oligarchs have managed to unite both the progressive left and the conservative right against them. The left objects that the tech industry remains almost totally un-unionized and seems to seek to eliminate gainful work for all but a handful. The right sees a threat to their political expression as they strengthen their hold on the means of communications, generally wiping non-progressive views from the screens of their customers.

Read it.

It will no doubt not surprise you to find that this comes from Harvard.

Freeberg imports some wisdom.

There’s a lot of talk these days about people being “anti-science.” The problem is, a lot of people making those claims either are a bit unclear on the idea of what science is or know full well what it is but are hoping you don’t. Just because someone calls something science doesn’t mean that it actually is.

First off, science is not a collection of “facts”. It’s not a set of conclusions. And it most certainly is not ultimate Truth, forever and ever, amen.

Science is a method. And the core of that method can be summed up in one simple question:

“How would we know if we were wrong?”

ZMan says what everybody knows.

Because I am not insane, I assumed the Jusse Smollett caper was a hoax as soon as it made the news. It ticked all the boxes of a hoax. The alleged victim was a black Jewish homosexual, who makes a living as a drama queen. The alleged incident happened in Chicago, where the last racist redneck was last seen in the 19th century. The incident happened in a part of town that caters to deviants like Smollett, not MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters. Again, only a nut would accept the story at face value.

…

… the general explanation is that these people need to be reinforced in their beliefs and they need to reinforce one another in their beliefs. Progressivism is a social system, as well as a set of beliefs. The believer is not just defined by his beliefs, but by his association with others. Much of the signaling we see from them is not intended for us. Like fireflies blinking in the dusk, they are signaling to one another. These hoaxes provide the opportunity for it.

Read it.

You mean you haven’t heard of the Men’s and Women’s March? You must have been living in a cave! Or you suddenly realize that no one has ever thought to organize such an exciting and significant event. And that it’s long overdue.

Ain’t gonna happen, of course, but it’s an entertaining thought.

Read it.

William Nordhaus was a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering work on the economics of climate change. On the day of the Nobel announcement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) released a special report advising the governments of the world on various steps necessary to limit cumulative global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The major media coverage treated the two events as complementary. In fact, they are incompatible. Although Nordhaus favors a carbon tax to slow climate change, his own model shows that the UN’s target would make humanity poorer than doing nothing at all about climate change.

Indeed, we can use Nordhaus’s and other standard models to show that the now-championed 1.5°C target is ludicrously expensive, far more costly than the public has been led to believe. This is presumably why the new IPCC special report does not even attempt to justify its policy goals in a cost/benefit framework. Rather, it takes the 1.5°C target as a politically “given” constraint and then discusses the pros and cons of various mechanisms to achieve it.

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More than 20 years ago, Professor David Labaree wrote in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning that our education system had turned into a costly race for educational credentials where people are pushed to get higher degrees “to stay a step ahead of the pack.”

In short, educational degrees are positional goods. Now that just about everyone gets a bachelor’s degree, you need a master’s degree to outshine the masses

Read it.

Not really sure how this is news….

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This video of Bernie Sanders in 1985, celebrating the 7th anniversary of the Communist takeover of Nicaragua, is a classic. I knew people who talked like this, but that was in the 1960s and early 1970s. By 1985, almost everyone knew better. But not Bernie Sanders.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming?  (Was AlGore in town?)

Read it.

Well, we certainly can’t have THAT….

(Let’s test it on Joe Biden and see whether it works….)

Read it.

A Marine at heart, if not in fact.

Read it.

People might get the impression that Democrats are socialists. Perish the thought!

Victor Davis Hanson.

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.”

Perfectly normal activity can become CrimeThink: ‘black market’, ‘price gouging’, ‘profiteering’, etc.

Read it.

Breakaway MPs accused of making off with info.

The Brexit controversy seems to be sparking a re-alignment of British politics, similar to the re-alignment that occurred over Irish Home Rule in the late 1900s. It will be interesting to see what shakes out.

Read it.

Unfortunately, money doesn’t buy votes the way it used to, even for Democrats.

Prediction: Too male, too pale, too stale. Jambalaya will get the nomination.

Read it.

An interesting piece, with a number of flaws.

I think the accompanying picture particularly unfortunate. Presumably it’s supposed to illustrate that people in ‘flyover country’ are physically unattractive, but if you add a number of tattoos and a piercing or two it could be any denizen of a Left Coast ‘vibrant’ neighborhood. Middle America has no lock on ugly.

One obvious lacuna is no mention of rich people. Rich people don’t live in the country, they live in cities; and not small cities, either, unless those small cities are right next to big cities. The rich people in Dallas don’t live in Parker or Murphy, they live in Highland Park — and so on around the country. Think about that for a bit.

Steve Sailer takes a victory lap.

You can call it Sailer’s Boast: Whenever there is some remarkably dumb development flabbergasting the respectable pundits, I’ve no doubt explained the entire phenomenon years ago in various Taki’s columns.

Steve Sailer counts ’em up.

The theory of Intersectionality — roughly, that the more categories of Victim you can check, the more Victim Privilege you enjoy — has been immensely influential since about 2013.

And those points can be traded for valuable prizes.

Read it.

That sounds about right.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, explains it all to you.

The main reason Amazon as a corporate entity does not pay much in taxes is because the company so vigorously reinvests its profit.  The resulting expensing provisions lower their tax liabilities, in some cases down to zero or near-zero.  That is in fact the kind of incentive our tax system is supposed to create, and does so only imperfectly, noting that many economists have suggested moving to full expensing.

Jeff Bezos has deliberately chosen a business strategy that minimizes nominal profit. That value, rather than being siphoned off by the government, goes toward increasing share value for shareholders. Look at a chart of Amazon’s share price over the last ten years if you don’t believe it. That’s why Jeff is now the Richest Guy In The World;; his wealth is primarily in Amazon stock.

Amazon pays plenty in terms of payroll taxes and also state and local taxes.  Nor should you forget the taxes paid by Amazon’s employees on their wages.  Not only is that direct revenue to various levels of government, but the incidence of those taxes falls somewhat on Amazon, which now must pay higher wages to offset the tax burden faced by their employees.

Remember that the next time that proglodytes lie to you and say that Amazon pays no taxes.

Victor Davis Hanson.

There are not enough racists left to fuel the current insatiable appetite of the anti-racism industry. So both victimizers and victims have to be invented — as we see with the Duke lacrosse lynching, the Virginia fraternity hoax, the Covington-kids invention, and the recent Jussie Smollett fraud.

Victor Davis Hanson does some analysis.

The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.

So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.

A fact insufficiently appreciated.

Read it.

Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a “reverse location” search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.

The technique has caught the attention of civil liberties lawyers who worry such warrants — deployed increasingly by police in the Twin Cities and around the country — are a digital dragnet ripe for abuse, and that judges may not realize the technical details or broad scope of the searches they’re authorizing.

We have the technology. Whether we will be allowed to use it has yet to be determined.

In the newsreader I use (Feedly) I have a ‘category’ called ‘British News’ that contains feeds from the various British newspapers and online publications that tend to have stuff in which I’m interested.

Ordinarily this would be an overwhelming amount of information to work through every day, but I’ve developed a method of filtering that gets rid of all the uninteresting stuff merely by looking at the accompanying photograph (British news sources are pretty conscientious about including at least one photograph in their stories).

1. Skip anything that has a picture of athletes (typically football/soccer players, but also cricket and American football–not the games, but the Colin-Kaepernick-style controversies).
2. Skip anything that has a picture of a member of the Royal Family. (Usually just ginned-up clickbait gossip; the Daily Mail and Express are especially bad about this.)
3. Skip anything that has a picture of a British politician that I recognize. (Theresa May and Jeremy Corbin are the poster children here, but I recognize a somewhat-frightening number of British political players;Diane Abbot proves that the ugly-fat-black-female-diversity-politician disease is starting to infect the Old Country.)
4. Skip anything that has a picture of crowds carrying protest signs in English. (You’d be astonished at the number of ‘demonstrations’ occurring in places that don’t speak English but carry English protest signs; Arabs and Africans are pretty dependable about that.)

This weeds out about 90% of the junk, and the rest is pretty manageable. (I must admit that I’m a sucker for a Trump Derangement story, and The Independent, despite its name, is a fruitful source for those.)

Read it.

What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses?

Apparently the psychic benefits are quite formidable.

You hear ex-professors say it all the time and I’ll add to the chorus:  despite nagging precariousness, there’s something profoundly liberating about leaving academe, whereupon you are no longer obliged to give a shit about fashionable thinkers, network at the planet’s most boring parties, or quantify self-worth for scurrilous committees (and whereupon you are free to ignore the latest same-old controversy), for even when you know at the time that the place is toxic, only after you exit (spiritually, not physically) and write an essay or read a novel or complete some other task without considering its relevance to the fascist gods of assessment, or its irrelevance to a gang of cynical senior colleagues, do you realize exactly how insidious and pervasive is the industry’s culture of social control.

John Yoo, who knows more about this stuff than I do.

John is currently a law professor at UC Berkeley, and is famous for pointing out how it’s legal to do stuff that set proglodytes’ hair on fire, such as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ during the Bush administration. He has the usual Harvard/Yale credentials that you would expect.

Read it.

An inconvenient scientific fact for the climate alarmist industry is that industrial carbon dioxide turns out to be plant food. The burning of fossil fuels to generate electrical power has not only led to dramatic economic growth, and hence the wealth that buys health and life expectancy. It also has led to a greening of the planet by carbon dioxide, an inert, non-polluting byproduct of combustion.

The fossil-fuel-driven 45 percent increase in CO2 levels since 1900 from a bit less than three percent of one percent of the atmosphere to a bit more than four percent of one percent has increased plant growth by at least 15 percent and perhaps as much as a third.

Read it.

Apparently this is a Hollywood archetype. We’re all in a 1930s rom-com.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a stock character first classified by Nathan Rabin in a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, a film he described as “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy.” “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” he wrote, “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

You could just as easily call her Tinkerbell: When you wish upon a star/Your dreams come true.

John C. Wright, SF author, on Heinlein’s view of the future.

What Heinlein failed to predict was that the Crazy Years would simply continue up through 2010, with no sign of slackening. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in the Crazy Years.

We do indeed.

While Heinlein (as far as I know) supplied no rationale for the advent and the recession of the craziness in the Crazy Years, A. E. van Vogt was freer with is speculations: insanity, either of individuals or of peoples, in van Vogt’s stories (and perhaps in the theories of I. B. Korzybski, who discovered or invented General Semantics) is caused by a fracture or disjunction between symbol and object. When your thoughts, and the thing about which you think, do not match up on a cognitive level, that is a falsehood, a false belief. When the emotions associated with the thought do not match to the thing about which you think, that is a false-to-facts association, which can range from merely a mistake to neurosis to psychosis, depending on the severity of the disjunction. You are crazy. If you hate your sister because she reminds you of your mother who beat you, that association is false-to-facts, neurotic. If you hate your sister because you have hallucinated that you are Cinderella, that association is falser-to-facts, more removed from reality, possibly psychotic.

Scott Adams makes this point repeatedly in his Periscope broadcasts, which are well worth watching every day in order to keep one’s mind on an even keel.

Read it.

Scott Adams has been making this point for some time now: The structure of the modern Democrat party makes it almost impossible for their Presidential nominee to be either white or male, even though that might be there best shot at beating Trump in 2020.

Read it.

On December 12, 2018 the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced the availability of three “playbooks” produced by the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition that includes 16 states and Puerto Rico, to address climate change and implement policies that advance the goals of the Paris Climate Accord. Each of these playbooks deserves detailed review and comment but this post only gives an overview based on my initial skim through the reports.

According to the announcement: “The playbooks will serve as implementation resources for states in deploying solar energy, spurring electric grid modernization, and enhancing resilience in the face of climate impacts and natural hazards. The three solutions are highlighted in the following playbooks: solar deployment, non-wire solutions (NWS), and resiliency.”

Read it.

Britain is turning into America without the white people.

Read it.

It would be an interesting problem to have. Presumably anyone in that situation would have a plan.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Ms Perez is part of an online community of people who carry out “First Amendment audits” which involves filming police officers to see how they react.

As part of the practice, an “auditor” stands filming in a public place and refuses to stop or identify who they are when approached by a police officer.

The people who film the videos consider themselves to be testing their constitutional rights.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Sarah Hoyt points out some inconvenient truths.

The left is very adamant about charity not coming “with a sermon.” It is most of their excuse for wanting government not churches to preach.

But while I understand the convinced Christian’s need to preach and to save everyone from hell, which if you believe it is an eternal sentence and an awful one is mere human decency, I don’t understand the left’s similar need to ensure that everyone lives “a decent life” by its lights.

They refuse to understand that just as people are entitled to disbelieve and deny eternal salvation (and if you’re a Christian you know they are entitled to that. It’s called free will. Just as they’re entitled to sin. Doesn’t make it right. They’re still entitled to it. You can’t force anyone to be holy) they can refuse to live a middle class life. (Or better. The left keeps imagining that middle class is much further up than it is. Possibly because so many of them these days are spoiled rich kids.)

Read it.

But it really doesn’t matter. Once again, Trump has seized the initiative, and Democrats are going to spend the next two years responding to him rather than whatever they had in mind for their agenda.

This is why Trump’s ‘base’ is the same as Patton’s: ‘We’re going to hold them by the nose, and we’re going to kick them in the ass.’

Read it.

Gee, I guess Trump didn’t get the memo that he’s totally in Putin’s pocket. Can’t the guy get anything right?

Read it.

I find that comforting.

There is no plane of reality in which it is necessary for a Briton to know how to fold a tortilla.

Read it.

Well, I’ve never had a dog pick my pocket.

I’ve never had a dog call me a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe.

I’ve never had a dog bitch me out because of my religion.

I’ve never had a dog try to use the men’s room in a store.

Makes you think.